Building Your Story from Scratch

Hi there folks, today I’m back with a post about building your story and how to work out the details of your story before you actually begin writing that. I’m going to list several points and hopefully they’re helpful for you.

So, let’s get started…

1. Make a Plan!

So as tempting as it can be, you should not just start writing your story without any notes or an idea of where you’re going with it. Write a basic plan of the plot points and how the story should move forward. This is useful because it keeps a track of all your ideas and it can be revised through the writing process.

2. Establish the Basic Rules!

Any universe you write will have unique rules, no matter how big or small. Ultimately you’re going to need to know all the limitations of them and to stay within them. Set these out early so you can stay true to your original idea.

3. Research the Genre!

So it helps greatly if you know what popular and overused tropes exist in your universe (example: quaint farm boy saves the world/universe. As happened in Eragon, The Hobbit, etc.), because people buy certain types of stories, but also get bored very quickly with the same thing. And as well as that, each genre includes different themes entirely. While in fantasy characters wouldn’t be found far from a source of magic or a blacksmiths town, in romance you’d expect coffee shops and the theatre. While this sounds simple, in practice it actually becomes a lot more difficult, the more work and detail you attempt to add. So research, you’ll be better off for it.

4. Write a Draft!

A brief outline written in the form of a story with the correct plot points will help you to realise what parts of your story don’t fit or need changing. As well as this it gives you something to follow while you write your story fully and will shape your idea of characters and locations far better. Do take into account that by a ‘brief outline’ I mean anywhere from 15,000 – 30,000 words. It should resemble a novel but not be nearly coherent enough to release alone. It does make all the difference.

5. Do Not Pre-Edit!

Finally, you should pay great attention to what you’re writing and annotate what needs fixing. But don’t fix it as you go. By the time you’ve finished your story you’ll find plenty of things throughout that need changing and often they will affect other things earlier or later in the story. You begin to lose track if you try to edit from the middle onwards. Definitely, don’t do the editing until after you’ve finished. The bonus to this is you can do one run through for the edit before handing it off to beta readers, as opposed to editing different sections over and over again until everything is coherent. And chances are, working that way, things won’t be coherent.

Hopefully, this has helped you, and I appreciate your time at my website. They’ll be another post this time next week with a similar theme, so come back then if you found this helpful. Have a great week folks.